Acquisition Of Coordinate Compound Words In Mandarin Chinese Children

Compounding, a union of two or more morphemes， is one of the commonmorphological phenomena, in some languages such as Mandarin Chinese and English.The studies on compound acquisition, compared with the inflectional and derivationalacquisition, are relatively few, especially in orthographic languages such as MandarinChinese. Of all the different structures, coordinate two-morpheme compounds are verycommon. So it is of great value to study the acquisition of Mandarin Chinesecoordinate compounds.The aim of this study is to investigate the development of coordinate compoundwords with two different categories and different semantic transparency. Twoexperiments were conducted concerning compound words comprehension andproduction. Specifically, this paper will address the following three questions:(1) Which type of coordinate compounds do children perform better on,coordinate compound nouns or coordinate compound verbs?(2) Does the semantic transparency of coordinate compounds have significanteffects on the performance of preschool children’s acquisition ofcompounds?(3) Does age influence preschool children’s performances of acquisition ofcompounds significantly in both production and comprehensionexperiments?The experiments were administered to60Mandarin Chinese Mainlandmonolingual kindergarten children aged from four to five years old. They got audio-(SONY ICD-SX35) and video-taped SONY HDR-HCI）in natural communication.There were120sessions in this study, and the recordings were analyzed aftertransferring to a PC.Through the data analysis, I have got the major findings below:(1) The results showed that lexical category exerted significant influence on boththe comprehension and production experiments. Children across two agegroups showed a preference for coordinate compound verbs in the twoexperiments.(2) Semantic transparency had significant effects on children’s comprehension ofcoordinate compound nouns. Through error analysis, it was found that, in thecomprehension of coordinate compound nouns, some children decomposed the compound into two separate morphemes and then explained them.(3) The results revealed that age had a significant effect on both comprehensionand production experiments: Children’s performances on the two experimentsimproved visibly with age.The findings above suggested that lexical category, semantic transparency as wellas age all had significant effect on the development of coordinate compounds inChinese preschool children. Children’s knowledge about coordinate compounds isdeveloping fast during their preschool years. However, the results of the current studyare not so effective and adequate to draw a full picture of the acquisition of Chinesecompound words because of the narrow scope of the tested items. A systematicexploration would be another exciting new direction for future research in Chinesechildren’s compounds acquisition.